Piece By Piece’s Filmmaker Remaps the Boundaries of Documentary

In Piece By Piece, Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville documents the life and times of Pharrell Williams as a LEGO animation. “When I had this crazy vision to tell this story through Lego bricks, I couldn’t have imagined a better partner than Morgan,” Williams explained in a press release in Variety. “He is a legend.”

Providing a wild ride of imagination, the film also hones in on the very real journey of a brilliant artist learning who he is through the music he creates. Including interviews with Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake, Busta Rhymes, Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, and Snoop Dogg, the film follows the emergence of Williams as a creative force in music today. Collider writes, “It’s through the use of the medium of a LEGO movie that audiences are granted a greater sense of reality and a deeper dive into the ideas at play.”

We spoke with Neville about transforming the life of a musical legend into an eye-opening LEGO animation.

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How did Williams explain his idea for the film to you?

At our first meeting, he said, "I love your films and I would love for you to make a documentary about me, and when you're done, throw out all the visuals and do it again in LEGO." When he got to the punchline, I found the idea very exciting. I can't say I knew what it meant other than it was going to be really different.

Why LEGO?

We talked about that. Part of that had to do with his love of LEGO, as well as the fact that he had four young kids and he felt this was the kind of storytelling he could share with them and kids in general. Part of his reason was that LEGOs, as the building blocks of creativity, are an apt metaphor for his story and how he creates music.

How did you transform this concept into a reality?

I was excited about the idea, but first, we had to get LEGO’s permission. I pitched them and, within five minutes, they told us they loved the idea. They said it was different, but the kind of different that was very exciting to them. Next, we created a 90-second proof of concept. Everyone we showed it to told us, “This is totally going to work.”

As a filmmaker, what is the advantage of using LEGO animation to tell Williams' story?

For one, you can visualize things in animation that you can’t show in the real world. Being able to show Pharrell’s synesthesia was really helpful, since his ability to see music is such a metaphor for his creative genius. We’re able to visualize beats as something he's physically making. Through the animation, we can time travel and be there when a song is being created. We can make you feel like you are in the booth when somebody's putting on a vocal for the first time. Most spectacularly, we can be in a fantasy land where music unlocks the doors of perception. It was incredibly fun to be able to play in that gear because it’s such a different gear than what I normally work in.

In what ways is the film also a traditional documentary?

Its bones are documentary, although one thing I did differently is that when I interviewed people, I pushed them to paint the details. I would ask them, “What did you say? And what did they say in response? What did the room look like?" I was really trying to get people to paint the scene so we could animate it. Using animation gave us a lot of freedom but also added restrictions. In the beginning, you can do anything within reason. But once you start down that road, it becomes very hard to change anything. It was two-plus years of grinding on every character, every set, every shot, and every lighting and camera placement to get it just right.

You developed a style guide for how to use animation in the film.

Yes, I felt it was important to include the grammar of documentary filmmaking in the film. Whether it's the way the handheld camera looks, the focus being not quite right, or a boom operator getting into a shot, we wanted the mistakes that happen in a documentary in the film. Then we wanted the interviews to bring to life the memories people talked about. And finally, there was the pure imagination of Pharrell’s vision, especially when dealing with water and space. When we cut the film, it was such a polyglot of all these different types of storytelling—from drawings to clips to music videos to Zoom recordings—but when it gets animated, it all becomes one thing. The animation makes it all one world.

Like with your documentaries, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, Piece By Piece plays with the tension between your subjects' public persona and private nature.

With these films, I’m starting with someone who people think they know all about. But as you get into their story, it’s rare that they are the same as their public persona. The distinction between the two becomes a really interesting way of figuring out who they are. Is the persona a dodge or an exaggerated reflection of who they really are? Interestingly, fame and celebrity are the least interesting things about these people. The question I'm usually asking is what actually makes this person a unique human being.

What do you hope people take away from the film?

Sort of what I took away from the film: Our idiosyncrasies are actually our strengths, not our weaknesses.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.